Court Swats Pesky Government After Painful Sting

For a moment it seemed like some sort of a delayed April Fool's Day trick. The Supreme Court denies the government one of its nasty little opportunities to put people in jail? This Supreme Court?

But, lo and behold, there it is.

The court says that a sting operation actually went too far. For my money, all stings go too far, and the court didn't go nearly far enough in bringing them to heel.

Narrowly decided and on narrow grounds, the decision involved a particularly outrageous effort wherein the authorities set out to punish someone who had done nothing wrong. He was minding his own business. He had broken no laws, had demonstrated no inclination whatever to do so. But the government knows better.

The government just knew that this stranger was undoubtedly the sort who would break a law if it could only make it easy for him to do so. Never mind the fact that he hadn't done a single thing to earn the attention. They were just sort of searching around for someone to hammer, and went after him. Tough luck.

But, as it was, it was hard to make it easy because he kept resisting the temptation. The government perserved, finally wore him down. They stood fairness on its head, distorted the already justice-distorting sting concept to trick the person into finally breaking the rules. It involved pornography which the government invited him to buy; they forced it on him time and again until finally he took the bait. And they arrested him.

Even the Supreme Court couldn't buy this one. A 5-4 majority couldn't anyway. They threw out the case.

The whole idea of stings -- where the government creates an opportunity for someone to commit a crime, rather than responds to one that has been committed -- is based on the spirit of the short cut. The pesky laws, regulations and traditions prove cumbersome, so they are simply avoided. The government makes the determination who should be punished and then rearranges reality to ensure it happens. Why wait when you can create? The concept has a certain neatness for the law enforcement officials, of course. They get to control everything. Often, it is dedicated to undeniably questionable people who can't be gotten by the regular, accepted means. The public, better-schooled in the true outrages of crime

than in the subtleties of justice, has little sympathy for the "bad guys" or anyone so-designated by the authorities. Doing things by hook or crook seems just fine.

The challenge is whether the government should ever be doing such things at all. A lot of mean ends get justified when the ends justify the means.

The most prominent of the stings was the celebrated Abscam a decade ago, an orgy of sandbagging congressional figures, ever-so-coincidentally mostly of the opposition political party. Ridiculing its own name, the Justice Department set out to lure people to commit crimes and indiscretions through bogus offers of cash and influence. That was held to be great sleuthing, and has become all the rage in the ensuing years.

But since when are we so short on actual crimes that we have to manufacture ones to find people guilty of? The police and agents don't have enough to do? And since when are we so lacking in laws to respond to the real crimes people commit that we have to create circumstances to haul them away? It seems to me pretty straightforward. If someone breaks the law, drop an anvil on him. There is no shortage of anvils, or of support for the dropping. But if he doesn't commit a crime, the government has no right to be creating one. None.

The sting presupposes one will commit a crime at some point, so why sit around twiddling our thumbs waiting for the inevitable? But, for one, I don't want my government agents in their plotting rooms weighing the worthiness of the citizenry: Who shall we go after? What lure will be strong enough to draw him down? And what other true crimes will we ignore while we dedicate ourselves to carrying out these?

There's a fairly powerful message relayed by a figure of no small authority which includes the urging, "Lead us not into temptation." That spirit has been a worthy one for two millennia. I'd guess it still has significance even today